Mystery P.I.: Portrait of a Thief Review

This will not help in the manhunt for Carmen Sandiego.

It's understandable that seek-and-find games have an audience. As a child reared on Highlighter magazines, seek-and-find puzzles have a natural attraction. On the surface it's a normal looking chair, but one of the legs is really that elusive baseball bat! In a nutshell, it's simple fun and a good way to kill time. Throw in a spy theme to the seek-and-find mix and you've got Mystery P.I. Portrait of a Thief for Nintendo DS.

As the title alludes to, you are a rookie detective trying to find stolen pieces of art. You'll cover seventeen areas of the city looking for clues including museums, parks, etc. I guess looking isn't the proper term though… you will seek and find clues throughout the city.

Each stage comes with a list of ten or so items to find. These are displayed on the top screen along with a full stage map. The bottom screen features a zoomed-in map complete with a bizarre amount of items strewn about. You can move around the crime scene by using the face buttons or dragging with the stylus. When you find an item on your list, just tap it to retrieve it.

Matching pairs will help you catch the thief...somehow.Finding items will reward you with points that increase your P.I. status. You start off as a gumshoe and work your way up to the league of Baker Street's finest. This status upgrade system does nothing to change the gameplay, but there's a certain satisfaction in going from a gumshoe to a flat foot (whatever those terms even mean).

Portrait of a Thief consists of several chapters. You have thirty minutes to visit the crime scenes, find the evidence, and solve a puzzle. These puzzles include fairly simple games like memory match, to more complex ones like jigsaw puzzles. It's a straightforward setup, but if your time runs out you'll have to start the chapter over. To keep things fresh, what you have to find in each stage changes with each visit. Also, there's a lot of junk lying around the different environments which makes for a ton of differing playthroughs.

The biggest challenge is beating the clock. Thirty minutes may seem like a healthy amount of time, but some of these items are concealed rather well. Wasting too much time will also have you stressing as you try to put a jigsaw puzzle together in your remaining sixty seconds. To help find items, you can use the hint button which shows the general area an item is in. Using hints will cost you points though, but can make all the difference in a race against time.

If you're having a lot of trouble finding something, your base instincts may tell you to tap like mad. To prevent tap happy detectives, Mystery P.I. will deduct points after so many successive taps. Like in Whose Line is it Anywa?, points really don't matter though other than for an arbitrary title, so feel free to play your instincts if needed.

The biggest problem with Portrait of a Thief is the presentation. The detective thing is fun, but what you're searching for has nothing to do with the case. Items you have to find range from hummingbirds to axes, both of which I hope were not involved in an art theft. If the items you found actually played into a more tangible theme or story, you might get a little more involved or attached. Suffice it to say that it's a hunt for random junk.

Visually, Mystery P.I. fits the bill for a seek-and-find, it's just not that stimulating. As crowded as they are, the environments still feel flat and boring. This problem could have been remedied if you were looking for actual clues to the crime and not barometers. Likewise, the sound is pretty generic, with two or three royalty free sleuthing tracks. Even the slightest bit of diversity would spruce up the sound department immensely.

The Verdict

With its timed chapters, Portrait of a Thief adds a little spin to the seek-and-find genre. However, it's such a minute variable that it rarely affects the game. The developers really try to play up the whole spy theme, but it falls flat with the random inventory of clues you have to track down. I would have been more entertained by a title that was just constantly changing seek and finds with no unifying theme to distract from what ultimately is a simple pleasure. In the end, it's a mediocre way to kill time that could probably be trumped by a Highlights book.